Capacity Management is series of processes seeking to ensure that organizations operate at optimum capacity while maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction. To be valuable to the business, Capacity Management requires the ability to balance resource demand against all available supply sources, attempting to minimize fulfillment time and to maximize business performance through the optimal use of low cost sourcing across an entire organization.
Existing implementations of Capacity Management do not address planning across a broad organizational structure or a longer timeframe. Instead, they rely on the use of varying local tools and spreadsheets with a more narrow and tactical view to capture headcount-based information about current and future needs. Since the primary focus is balancing to the local financial plan, there is often no direct linkage to strategic skill management. These methods, although sufficient to react to immediate headcount needs at the local level, do not address the requirement for a more strategic view across a wider organizational structure. They also do not account for the actual skills required. The result is sub-optimal resource capacity as evidenced by simultaneous skill shortages and idle capacity, and labor costs that may exceed the market norms. This situation exists in any large scale services business where there are multiple business units, such as divisions within a company or different geographic locations, all with the potential for overlapping skills and multiple channels to supply the required resources.